Postcomposition

Sidney I. Dobrin

Publication Year: 2011

Post-Composition argues that Composition Studies‘ intellectual focus upon (writing) subjects and the teaching and management of those subjects rather than upon writing itself has shackled the potential of writing studies.

Cover

Frontmatter

Book Title

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

I would be foolish to pretend that this book was solely the product of my
work; it is collaboration in the truest sense. Without the conversations, feedback,
taunting, prodding, and encouragement from many, this book would
have taken a much less useful or interesting shape. ...

Introduction: On the Occasion of Becoming Postcomposition

Don’t panic. I am not calling for the end of composition studies or even
identifying something as dramatic as the death of composition studies,
despite the way that many may read the title of this book. The rumor of the
death of composition studies has been greatly exaggerated. What the field
was and is, is still likely to be—at least for a while. ...

1. Disrupting Composition Studies

Composition studies, as a field, doesn’t talk much about its intellectual future
and only minimally considers its institutional future (the notable exception
is the September 2010 special issue of College Composition and Communication
that takes up composition studies’ future). Perhaps this is the case
because it has been enamored with its own history. ...

2. The Space of Writing

Because of the more popular use of “post” as an indicator of chronology,
many may hear postcomposition to indicate an issue of time, a marker of
a shift in era, a time after composition studies. However, as I hope I have
indicated thus far, I intend “post” primarily as a spatial indicator. Separating
the spatial from the temporal is a tricky maneuver, ...

3. Beyond the Subject of Composition Studies

To begin to shift focus from subject toward a greater attention to writing, I
propose reconfiguring how we think about the subject, the writing-subject,
and the student-subject in composition studies. Undoubtedly, subject/subjectivity
has played a key role in composition studies’ evolution, permitting
the field to develop a body of “research” about subjectivity and to claim an
authority to govern over student subjects. ...

4. Beyond the Administration of Subjects

In his preface to Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo’s 2004 WPA
Best Book Award–winning Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration:
Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline,
Edward M. White offers a greatly abbreviated history of writing program
administration, a history that is explicated and amplified throughout in the
essays that follow. ...

5. Ecocomposition Postcomposition

Writing is an ecological phenomenon. It is spatial, relational, and complex
and thus requires complex theories (and a complex of theories) in order to
attempt to understand its intricacies, functions, and possibilities. Forwarding
this notion that writing is ecological, a small number of composition
scholars began to import ecological methodologies into composition studies
just after the millennial shift. ...

6. The Edge of Chaos

Interestingly, Cary Wolfe’s systems theory in Critical Environments looks
remarkably like the rudiments of the complexity theories that have begun
to creep into the fringes of composition, providing an invigorating and potentially
groundbreaking shift in how the field views rhetoric and writing. ...

7. Pedagogy

The mantras of composition studies have worn thin, no longer offering
answers that satisfy emerging questions about writing in its networked,
hyper-circulatory condition. Questions now linger, unanswered by composition
studies’ dominant inquiries of the last forty years: How is writing
learned? How do students write? How do students learn to write? ...

Postscript: On the Very Idea of Post-ness

This postscript is problematic, both in its placement and its argument.
What unfolds here is an exploration of the idea of “post.” It is an unpacking
of the term that I engaged early in this project in order to better understand
what it might mean to suggest that something might occur postcomposition. ...

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Author Bio

Sidney I. Dobrin is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where for ten years he directed the writing program. Dobrin has authored and edited more than sixteen books and numerous articles. His current research engages posthumanisms; visual rhetorics, cultures, and literacies; and ecological methodologies....

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